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46:13 Braves player Austin Riley on the podcast, and we were

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10:56 play the Braves night. I saw an ESPN headline this

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01:48 joined by Austin Riley Third Basement for the Atlanta Braves. 1:23:04 and this is exclusive to Braves games. Right, So they 1:30:46 contract with the Braves. It was uh hadn't been done

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10:53 sixteen to four ro out of the Braves. Metsri five

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09:49 with the Braves for thirty eight million dollars, despite all

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22:34 seeing him at a Braves game, a baseball game, with

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18:28 Home of the Braves in our hometown. Thirty seven percent

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20:25 like all right, ended up seeing him at a Braves game,

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51:59 Damit ist nun meine Szene 3a auch durch.

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27:58 I'm saying it at the Onland of Braves when I

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48:36 Last week on MSB, we began our dive into the role played by the advertising agency Densu in shaping victory Gundam and deciding its fate as a work by talking generally about the role of the advertising industry in japanese commerce, how agencies first emerged as brokers for newspaper advertising space during the Meiji period, and how they evolved over the course of the 20th century to become full service shops offering expertise in everything from tv commercial production to market research, while retaining their traditional role as the brokers of both space and time in the mass media. As brokers, the ad agency's own short term business interests were often at ods with those of their clients, advertisers and media both. And yet their success, indeed their very survival, depended more on the strength of the interpersonal bonds they cultivated with those same clients than on their actual skill in the creation of advertisements. In his book, a japanese advertising agency, anthropologist Brian Moran emphasizes this interpersonal element. Quote, account executives soon learn that they are not required to be specialists in the field of their clients operations, nor are they expected to carry out the kind of strategic planning that typifies the work of account executives in european and american agencies. Rather, since what matters is process rather than results per se, these salesmen learn that they should be seen to be trying hard. Provided that account executives do exhibit this kind of what the Japanese like to call ishokenme attitude, a client will accept their account team's work even though it may not have been as effective as it might have wished. If, on the other hand. An account team's advertising ideas are successful, but the account executive in charge is not seen to be sufficiently diligent in his attention. The client may terminate the account. Moran notes that the term used for this kind of human chemistry work in the industry is Newaza, which literally means sleeping skills, but which I recognize from judo as the term for when the fight goes to the mats and you have to wrestle for a submission hold, and which the dictionary informs me is also a euphemism for underhanded dealing, at least according to the ad agency employees Moran spoke with. These so called Nawaza skills accounted for about two thirds of an agency's ability to attract and retain clients, their skills as advertisers accounting for the remaining third. This kind of human chemistry was especially important because, at least when Moran was doing his research, most business in the advertising industry was conducted without any kind of contract, a point of pride for many participants. Trust and mutual exchange of favors were the sinew by which the industry moved. And nowhere was this more true than in the extremely high stakes realm of tv advertising. At the time, at least, tv was the most important medium in japanese advertising. Tv ads represented around 30% of the nation's ad market, seven times more than radio, four and a half times more than magazines, and almost double that of their closest rival newspapers. And while different agencies might be stronger in one medium or another, all of the top agencies derived at least 30% of their total revenue from tv ads. In 1990, almost every household in Japan had at least one color tv set, and on average, each household watched around 7 hours of tv per week, with an average of three people watching at any given time. There were five commercial networks and each broadcast at least 22 hours per day, with two or more of those hours devoted to commercials. The standard 30 minutes program was actually 29 minutes plus 1 minute of socalled spot advertising between programs. Of the 29 minutes, three were reserved for what is called time advertising. We'll come back to those terms later. This left 26 minutes for the program itself, which is why tv anime is almost always 26 minutes long. The commercials that ran in those ad blocks ranged from 15 to 30 seconds, generally trending towards shorter rather than longer as costs ballooned. In the early days of tv, the ads were longer even as long as three minutes. But by the 1990s, producing commercials and buying ad time on tv had become prohibitively expensive. Making 130 2nd commercial in 1990 could cost as much as ¥120,000,000, something like $800,000 at the time, and nearly $2 million if adjusted for inflation. And that's not counting the cost of putting the thing on tv. Even so, in those latter years of the booming bubble economy, ad agencies created about 10,000 new tv commercials a year. Densu alone was responsible for as many as 2000 in 1990. But how did those ads actually get onto tv when commercial tv first started up? Actually, in a neat little coincidence, the very first ads to run on tv in the United States and Japan, more than a decade apart, were both for watchmakers Boulova in the US and Seiko in Japan. And the Seiko commercial was created for the company by none other than Densu. That first Seiko commercial has been lost. The original film was unfortunately destroyed in 1963. But a different Seiko commercial, which ran later the same day, did survive. And Seiko calls this one the first tv ad in japanese history, because it's good publicity for the company anyway. When commercial tv started up, advertising agencies would themselves come up with ideas for television programs. They would persuade networks to buy them, recruit sponsors to fund them, and then hire studios to produce them. This meant that it was the ad agencies on behalf of the sponsors, who really controlled the content of any tv show. Not completely. The tv stations had some influence as the buyer and the ultimate broadcaster. But the balance of power rested with the agencies and the sponsors. Tv sponsorship was relatively cheap at the time, so shows typically only had one sponsor, and that sponsor could exercise a significant amount of influence over the show's content. One consequence of this in the US was frequent and frequently ludicrous meddling by those sponsors. Moran notes a few specifics. Chevrolet sponsored the western gunsmoke, and so the characters were never supposed to say that they were going to Ford a river. Ford wanted the Chrysler building painted out of backdrops of the New York skyline, and Chrysler asked a game show contestant named Ford to change his name. I think my favorite of these, though, is the light bulb manufacturer Westinghouse, who insisted on changing the title of an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's the Light that failed, because we would not want our light bulbs to be associated with failing lights, would we? American tv stations were not thrilled with this system, and throughout the 1950s they gradually worked to weaken the grip of the ad agencies on program development. They were helped in this by a major scandal that broke in the late 50s when it came out that many of the most popular tv game shows were completely rigged. This scandal seriously damaged the credibility of the ad agencies responsible, and it was big enough to attract congressional notice, even legislation. The tv networks pled ignorance. They canceled most of their game shows and took advantage of the opportunity to assert greater control over their schedules, working directly with production companies to develop their own lineups. In 1962, the network ABC started the practice of holding what is called an upfront, a round of presentations to advertisers where the network announces its upcoming schedule and shows off the lineup of programs to convince advertisers to buy ad slots for particular shows in advance. Any leftover ad slots get sold piecemeal closer to airtime in what's called the scatter market. But things developed quite differently in Japan. The tv stations there never managed to squeeze out the ad agencies, and in 1990, those agencies remained directly involved in and indispensable to program development. I don't want to oversell the agency's power. They were not the secret puppet masters of all tv media. Program decisions were ultimately still made by the tv stations. Creative decisions were mainly made by the studios making the shows. But agencies did develop ideas for shows, analyze the market to determine whether the show might find an audience, recruit sponsors, find production studios, and pitch the whole package to the tv networks. In exchange, they received the right to broker the sales of the ad slots during the program. That was a very lucrative privilege. We've already noted how expensive tv ad spots were for agencies paid on commission. Securing a spot on a tv schedule was a bit like a prospector hitting a rich vein of gold. On top of that, they might also secure for themselves the merchandising rights to the new show. If the show turned out to be a hit, or better yet, a durable franchise, those merchandising rights could be extremely valuable and might even be enough to keep a small, specialized agency afloat for a long time. This is foreshadowing for next week. The pitching process could work a couple of different ways that involve more or less involvement from the agencies. A tv station might have an existing show that needed a new sponsor for one reason or another. In this case, they would notify all the ad agencies and ask them to propose new sponsors from among their clientele. At this point, the agencies would submit bids and the tv station would pick the best bid to become the new sponsor. Best could mean offering the most money, but often not. Prestige mattered a lot to the tv stations, and so did finding a good fit for the program. They also needed to make sure that the new sponsor meshed well with any other sponsors on the same program. It was bad practice to allow two competing companies to co sponsor the same program. In a scenario that's a little bit more relevant for us, the tv station might have an opening in their schedule and need a new program to fill it. The idea for that new program might come from anywhere. From the tv station, from an advertiser with something to sell, from a production studio with a story they wanted to tell, or from the ad agency's own staff. But in each case, the second step was to take that idea to an ad agency. Because it was the agencies and not the networks, not the sponsors, not the production houses that had developed the expertise and the infrastructure necessary to assemble all of the different pieces, creative and business, into an overall strategy that they could pitch to the tv station. To convince them to buy the show and put it on air, they sold themselves as the experts on the tastes of the tv watching public, and agencies lived or died on their ability to deliver on that promise. For example, Kusube Sankichiro, a Manchukwo born anime producer working at Shin a animation, is credited with the idea for the 1979 re adaptation of Doriman. It was Kusube who convinced the original mangaka to authorize a second attempt, despite the ill starred failure of the first adaptation. But it was not Kusube who convinced TV Asahi to take a chance on Doriman. That task was entrusted to the advertising agency Asahi Tsushinsha, also known as Asatsu and now called ADK. They were able to do this in part because TV Asahi was looking to shore up their weak primetime lineup and because Asatsu had the market research to back up their pitch. They believed Dorimon could be a big hit. And they were right. This second adaptation ran for more than 1800 episodes, only ending in 2005. It was immediately replaced by another adaptation of Doriman, also handled by Asatsu, which is still running today. It probably helped that Asatsu had already established themselves as animation specialists and as hitmakers, or at least the representatives of hitmakers, because they had also been the ad agency for, among other things, the mazinger franchise. For another example, the 1982 Captain Harlock movie Arcadia of my Youth was produced in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Tokyo agency. If the tv station decided to accept a show, they would buy it from the production studio, typically at a flat rate per episode. This fee might be less than the actual cost to make the episode. In fact, I understand that to be the rule rather than the exception. The additional funding necessary to make up the difference had to come from other sources, usually the sponsors, who got in exchange a license to sell branded merchandise. This practice goes all the way back to 1963 and Tezuka Osamu's momentous decision to undercut his competitors by selling episodes of Astro Boy for less than half of what they cost to produce, making up the difference in royalties. We often talk about the role of toy manufacturers like Clover or bandai, who have enjoyed a long, visible and well documented symbiotic relationship with the studios who make the mecca anime that we love. But there have always been other sponsors just as eager to capitalize on the popularity of a hit show to move merchandise. Back in season one, Nina talked about how music label King Records more or less created the market for anime soundtrack albums off the back of first Gundam's popularity. Then there's confectioner Morinaga, who used to sweeten their milk coffee caramel candies by packaging them together with mini gunplicates. But the main thing that sponsors got for their contributions was the right to buy advertising slots during the three minutes per half hour allotted to time advertising. This was a big deal in 1990. Getting your commercial on tv and in front of people's eyeballs was not a simple matter of showing up at the tv station with a reel of film and a fistful of cash. Moran describes a seller's market in which there were many more companies looking to sponsor shows than there were opportunities to do so. He likened the ad agency media buyers bidding on these rare spots to gamblers playing roulette at Monte Carlo. With only five commercial networks in the country, there simply weren't very many new shows being put on each year, and sponsors were loathed to abandon a successful program. One thing that Moran did not directly address in his book is the question of what constitutes a new program. That might seem like a simple question to answer. One show ends and another one replaces it. The second one is a new program, but when you start to look closely, the distinction gets a little fuzzy. From the outside, double Zeta looks like a new program, but from the business side, it was a continuation of its predecessor, the same sponsors, the same production studio, the same ad agency, and it aired in the same time slot on the same network. In fact, if you look at that particular time slot, Saturdays at 05:30 p.m. On Nagoya television, a time slot so storied that it has its own Wikipedia page, you will notice that it was monopolized by shows from the tripartite coalition of Sotsu, Clover, and Sunrise from 1977 until 1983. This arrangement, in which Sotsu bought time on Clover's behalf and filled it with whatever giant robot anime Sunrise was making that year, was not disturbed until Clover's bankruptcy during the middle of aura battler Dunbine, which created one of those rare opportunities for a new sponsor to jump into an already running and at least moderately successful program. Bondi inserted itself into the void left by their former rival and the new second triumvirate of Sotsu Bondi. Sunrise monopolized the spot for a further five years, until 1988, when Bondi decided to pull their sponsorship after the conclusion of metal armor Dragonar. According to Uda Masuo, Sunrise had pitched Bondi on a follow up to Dragonar, but the toy maker was not interested. This put sunrise in something of a desperate situation. The studio considered that Nagoya television spot to be crucial, the more so because they did not at the time have any time slots on any of the premier Tokyo based tv stations. I'll talk more about what that means, the importance of the so called key stations in Tokyo, and how Nagoya television fit into that scheme. Next week, when Bondi balked at whatever Sunrise had planned to follow Dragonar, the studio began desperately looking around for other sponsors. But they'd run out of time. The tv slot fell vacant. At this point, the tv station did something kind of extraordinary. They put on an emergency filler show for three months, giving Sunrise time to assemble a new sponsor and advertising agency, coalition. UDA credits this to the long relationship of trust that Sunrise and Nagoya television enjoyed. Those three months allowed Sunrise's top brass to reach out to some old, old business associates at toy company Takara, who they had known as far back as the 1960s, before the original Sunrise crew broke away from mushi productions to form their own studio, either because they liked the show or because they trusted sunrise, or just because they wanted to steal a march on Bandai. Takara agreed to take over as the main sponsor for the time slot. The new show would be a collaboration between Takara as main sponsor, Sunrise as production studio, and Tokyo as ad agency. That show turned out to be the wildly popular and enduringly influential legendary armor samurai troopers, which I used to watch on tv before school under its english name, Ronin Warriors. I don't know whether Sotsu was involved in this pitching process. Presumably they wanted to keep that valuable Nagoya television spot just as bad as Sunrise did. But perhaps Takara preferred to work with a different agency. Perhaps Sotsu was simply too closely associated with Bondi. I've yet to find any examples of Takara and Sotsu collaborating on anything, but either way, they lost the spot they had monopolized since 1977. Moran describes the struggle to replace a departing sponsor from the agency's perspective. Quote the main problem is when and how information about a program falling vacant is released. After all, the agency handling a sponsor who decided to drop out of a program is privy to information that neither rival agencies nor the network itself knows. It can therefore make a kind of preemptive strike by finding a substitute sponsor before informing the key station concerned of its present client's intention to stop supporting a program. Those in the business used to say that this was a ploy typically used by Densu, which had a long list of prestigious clients from which to choose and persuade a station to accept. Lesser agencies were not usually in a position to make such demands. It strikes me that Sotsu may well have been extremely lucky that Clover went bankrupt during rather than after the airing of aura battler Dunbine. With the show still in production, there was a strong interest in maintaining as much continuity as possible and little time to ask other agencies to put in bids. Bondi was ready and willing to work with Sotsu, and by the time the show ended, there was no particular reason to upset that new business arrangement. The new Tokyo Takara Sunrise partnership proved durable. They produced a second show, Jushin Liger, in 1989 before striking gold with Brave X Kaiser in 1990. Kicking off the Brave series, they pumped out a new brave show every year until the 1998 finale of King of Braves Gao Guy Gar. Low ratings and poor toy sales brought about the end of the Tokyo Takara partnership and that Saturday evening anime time slot. Nagoya Television replaced it with a Sunday morning spot that would be dominated by Tokyo until 2007 and then by Asatsu until 2016. Although the ad agencies remained consistent during those periods, there was a rotating cast of studios and main sponsors, which really tells you something about the influence of the ad agencies if you view it as a series of individual works. That Nagoya television Saturday evening time slot hosted something like 21 different programs over the course of two decades. But if you view it as a sponsorship deal for a specific time slot, it's really only three programs, Sotsu Clover, Sotsu Bandai, and Tokyo Takara. Funding for new projects became increasingly scarce in the postbubble economy of the mid 90s. Sponsors had less money to throw around, and they were less willing to take big risks on new projects. This was especially true for anime and other kids shows. Japan's changing demographics meant that there were fewer and fewer young people buying merch, and the increasing popularity of video games undermined those traditional toy manufacturers whose large s had funded so many shows in the this would ultimately lead to the production committee system, but that is a story for another season for all of the parties involved in one of these deals, there was a complicated negotiation of conflicting interests. The tv networks wanted to pick shows that would attract viewers because better ratings moved the network up in the rankings and allowed them to charge more for their ad time. Plus, a popular show at the start of the primetime lineup could improve viewership for all of the shows that followed it, boosting the whole network. But they also wanted to attract good, which is to say prestigious, sponsors, because the prestige of the advertisements running on your network reflected back on you. And as always, the more prestigious your network became, the more you could charge for ad spots. So a network might choose to offer special discounts or accept a show that they would otherwise reject if they thought doing so could land them a really top notch sponsor. They might also feel that they owed the ad agency a favor, or they might want to offer a favor to a powerful agency with the expectation that it could be called in the next time they found themselves in a pickle. Remember that lend and borrow philosophy? The exchange of favors between longtime business associates was crucial to the industry's culture. Of course, the sponsors also wanted a show that a lot of people would watch. But more than that, they wanted the right kind of viewers. A company that meant to sell luxury imported cars to businessmen had no interest advertising during the middle of the day, when the audience would be mostly housewives. And they wanted a show that enhanced their company's prestige, either because of its content, its quality, the size or character of its audience, or even because it aired in a particularly good time slot on a prestigious network, because the halo effect of clout radiates in every direction. As for the ad agencies big enough to be playing in the high stakes game of tv advertising, they invariably had multiple clients and multiple shows going on at any given time. This might well lead them to engage in horse trading, offering a network a better deal on this show in exchange for more favorable terms on that show. Again, Densu in particular was known for this practice. You may have noticed by now that Densu comes up whenever we talk about a big agency leveraging its size and influence for its own advantage. And that is for the simple reason that Densu was and is the largest agency in Japan by far. In 1989, Densu's billings, the amount of advertising spending that passed through the agency, and also the standard that is used to compare agencies within the industry, were more than double those of its next closest competitor, Hakuhodo. The third place agency, Tokyo, had total billings, less than 15% of Densu's. In fact, Densu's billings for that year exceeded those of the next five biggest agencies combined. And yet I have never once had occasion to mention Densu in connection with anime on tv. According to Oedo Masuo's tweets, the agency had never worked on a tv anime before, and I have not seen anything to contradict him. They're involved now. They're involved up to their eyeballs. But it all started with Victory Gundam. That's all for now. Next week we'll pick up the story of Densu, TV Asahi, and the campaign to get victory Gundam on tv. Plus, what actually constituted a hit tv show in the early 90s. Whatever happened to Sotsu? And as a bonus, how could it be an advertising agency's fault that there are so many SD Gundam video games?

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24:04 knowledge to baseball players like Tyler Matzik of the Braves,

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34:28 when the Braves won the UH When the Braves won 34:34 And I followed the Braves and and this guy was 37:42 the big leagues, won the World Series with the Braves

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12:27 he was drafted by the Braves in the thirty third round.

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25:31 against the Braves Big three, Smoltz, Maddox and Tom Glavin,

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02:40 to the Atlanta Braves forming the Milwaukee Braves, but his 06:40 and listened to the Braves, you know, especially when they're

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1:06:34 by who braves the oracles of death in search of truth,

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